'The most surprising thing I discovered was his autobiography. You assume an 800-page biography by Wagner is going to be heavy, but it's one of the most entertaining biographies by an artist I've ever read', said Simon. 'It shows he does have a sense of humour. It doesn't conceal anything, it's absolutely lousy with anti-Semitism but equally it's full of vision and brilliance and jokes. He was a funny man!'

In creating Inside Wagner's Head, Simon revealed he has discovered a hugely complex character - one who was fervently nationalist but who hated militarism and imperialism. The BAFTA-winning actor also spoke of reconciling Wagner's anti-Semitism with his ability to create awe-inspiring works:

'It's really difficult - I think that it's a pathology in his case. When he was being painted by Renoir he chit-chatted most agreeably with Renoir and then suddenly a five-minute tirade against the Jews, completely unprovoked, and then after the tirade back to chit-chat. It was like a Tourette's syndrome.

'Wagner was a delinquent by temperament... he glamorized his participation in the revolution of 1849 - he went round joining in with the general mood of danger and excitement. He was very excited by being in the presence of [Mikhail] Bakunin, the great anarchist; the most famous terrorist in the world at the time. Wagner, like Dickens, is one of those people who attracted extraordinariness to him. Wherever he went, everything became more extreme. He self-dramatized to an astonishing degree, but that's who he was.'

Simon also spoke about Wagner's relationship with his patron King Ludwig II of Bavaria, his revolutionary activities and Wagner's turbulent love affairs as well as giving a sense of how he himself developed Wagner's voice for the one-man show.

Update: The transmission date for Les Vêpres siciliennes has changed. This relay will no longer be a live broadcast.

Royal Opera performances to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 over Autumn and Winter 2013/14 have been confirmed.

A total of seven operas will be broadcast between September and February, including live relays of Verdi's Les Vêpres siciliennes and Wagner's Parsifal, both celebrating the bicentenaries of their composers.

All broadcasts will be available afterwards on BBC iPlayer. In addition to full performances, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast a number of interviews and features throughout the 2013/14 Season. For details of these, follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

Giacomo Puccini's Turandot was the composer's final opera - he died in 1924 before it could be completed. The opera eventually had its premiere in 1926, one year and five months after Puccini's death, completed by Franco Alfano. Halfway through the third act the orchestra rested and conductor Arturo Toscanini turned to the audience announcing, 'Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died', before the performance segued into Alfano's ending.

Prior to the return to Covent Garden of Andrei Serban's Royal Opera production we asked our Twitter following what opera endings they would amend given the chance, and what they would add or take away:

@RoyalOperaHouse Captain Vere and Billy Budd desert, row to Jersey and open a nice B&B.

From 12 to 4pm Dominic Peckham, Artistic Director of the Royal Opera House RM19 Youth Singing Group will lead three choral workshops in the Clore Studio that will introduce both community singing and the chorus itself. The workshops will culminate in a special event in Covent Garden Piazza.

The Festival of Voices is just one of a number of free events taking place at the Royal Opera House as part of Stephen Fry's Verdi and Wagner-themed Deloitte Ignite which will also feature live radio broadcasts, debates and pop-up performances inspired by the composers and their work.

Deloitte Ignite runs from 6 - 29 September. Follow us on Twitter for regular updates about this year’s Deloitte Ignite, or search for #DeloitteIgnite.

265 personalities from fields as diverse as comedy and science have chosen music by Richard Wagner.

Deloitte Ignite curator Stephen Fry devoted two of his eight choices to the composer – the Magic Fire Music from Die Walküre and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde while Comedian and actor John Cleese, famed for starring in ‘Monty Python’ and ‘Fawlty Towers’ chose the prelude from the same opera, saying: ‘Music either seems to cheer me up or touch me. This almost has a physical effect on me’.

Actor Simon Callow, who will perform a one-man show, Inside Wagner’s Head as part of Deloitte Ignite, chose theTannhäuser overture to reflect his relationship with his grandmother, who was a singer.

Physicist Stephen Hawking chose Act I from Die Walküre: ‘After I was diagnosed with Motor Neurone disease in 1963, I turned to Wagner as someone who suited the dark and apocalyptic mood I was in,’ he said. ‘The four operas of the Ring Cycle are Wagner’s greatest work. I went to see them at Bern in Germany with my sister in 1964. I didn’t know The Ring well at the time, and Die Walküre made a tremendous impression on me’.

Claude Debussy, one of the most influential composers of his era, was born in the western suburbs of Paris in 1862. From an early age, the composer was as argumentative and radical as he was talented, challenging the rigidity of his formal training at the Paris Conservatoire and striving to create a new music: ‘Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand?’ he wrote. ‘The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.’ A self-taught and brilliant pianist, he favoured dissonances and developed a unique sound world. Though he was often identified as an Impressionist, it was a term he despised, dubbing those who appropriated it ‘imbeciles’.

To celebrate Debussy’s birthday, we’ve picked out a few examples of the composer’s music that have inspired choreographers:

Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Afternoon of a Faun)

Originally conceived as a symphonic poem for orchestra inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé's poem of the same name, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faunehas become one of Debussy’s most famous works, alongside his iconic symphony La Mer and sole opera Pelléas et Mélisande. Its opening, chromatic flute solo remains one of the most famous passages in musical modernism. It was made into a short (and controversial) ballet for the Ballets Russes by Vaslav Nijinsky in 1912, with staging and choreography reminiscent of ancient friezes. This overtly erotic work is considered one of the first modern ballets. The work was reinterpreted by Jerome Robbins in 1953, who transposed the setting to a sunny ballet studio. It was later referenced in Queen’s video for I Want to Break Free, in which Freddie Mercury danced the role of the faun alongside Royal Ballet dancers, with choreography by Wayne Eagling.

Jeux

Although somewhat eclipsed by the infamous premiere of The Rite of Spring that took place two weeks later, Jeux (Games) with its erotic subtext added to a controversy-filled 1913 for the Ballets Russes. With a narrative based on a game of tennis and a lost ball that leads to a departure into the garden bushes, the score was Debussy's last completed work for orchestra. It changes speed every two bars and is striking for almost never repeating any musical material – the composer described how he created the work for ‘an orchestra without feet’. Like L'Après-midi d'un faune, Jeux was also choreographed by Nijinsky, who originally intended it to be a flirtatious exchange between three male dancers. However, company impresario Sergei Diaghilev insisted it be danced by one male and two females.

Monotones

Debussy's 1896 orchestrations for his friend Erik Satie's 3 gymnopédies catapulted Satie to fame – much to Debussy's later chagrin. Debussy orchestrated only the first and third, believing the second did not lend itself to orchestration; Satie acolyte Alexis Roland-Manuel later completed the triptych with his own orchestration. Discovering the music years later, Ashton was struck by its form and hypnotic purity, and went on to craft a masterpiece of other-worldly beauty.

Alastair Marriott created Sensorium in 2009, setting it to Debussy’s Préludes, orchestrated by Colin Matthews. The Préludes, originally written for solo piano, were written late in Debussy's life. They were divided into two books of twelve each, published in 1910 and 1913. Marriott opted to use seven préludes, including two for solo piano, which he set as mesmerizing pas de deux.

Which Debussy works do you love?
Or, if you could create a ballet scored by one of the composer’s works, which would you choose and why?

]]>http://www.roh.org.uk/news/claude-debussy-and-ballet-a-beautiful-fusion/feed1Philip Venables announced as Doctoral Composer-in-Residence at Guildhall School of Music and Dramahttp://www.roh.org.uk/news/philip-venables-announced-as-doctoral-composer-in-residence-at-guildhall-school-of-music-and-drama
http://www.roh.org.uk/news/philip-venables-announced-as-doctoral-composer-in-residence-at-guildhall-school-of-music-and-drama#commentsThu, 22 Aug 2013 12:00:16 +0000Chris Shipmanhttp://www.roh.org.uk/?p=23218Philip Venables, Guildhall School of Music and Drama Composer in Residence, 2013

Composer Philip Venables has been announced as the first Doctoral Composer-in-Residence at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the result of a collaboration between the conservatoire and the Royal Opera House.

The new position is one of the first examples of an opera company and conservatoire joining forces to offer a ‘Composer-in-Residence’ studentship which leads to a doctoral degree, a path long established in orchestral music.

Philip will be supervised by Guildhall School’s Head of Composition, Dr Julian Philips, who was the first ever Composer-in-Residence at Glyndebourne. His new opera How The Whale Became, an adaptation of a collection of stories by Ted Hughes, receives its world premiere at the Royal Opera House in December 2013.

The studentship is fully-funded by the Guildhall School and will take on a new Composer-in-Residence every two years. Composers will have the chance to present a major work in the third year of study in the Linbury Studio Theatre at Covent Garden.

'I'm really excited about starting work on this opera with the Royal Opera House and the Guildhall School - it's a potential game changer for me, and a chance, in a structured and supported way, to really explore what opera means to me, to be completely inventive, bold and daring and to present the results of that on a high-profile stage.'

'We're delighted that Philip Venables is joining The Royal Opera and Guildhall School on our first joint composer residency. Philip's work has increasingly embraced collaborative and multi-media practice and so it is a natural step for him to now research and write music theatre with us. We are looking forward to developing and making work with him.'

‘Nessun dorma’ must have a claim to be the most famous opera aria ever – thanks to a certain World Cup and the Three Tenors. No doubt some of the millions encountered Turandot through ‘Nessun dorma’ then listened to more music from the opera. And there are other wonderfully smooth and tuneful solos in the opera, such as Liù’s ‘Signore ascolta’. However, it is just as much an opera of big crowds. They can have their lyrical moments too, and sometimes in the most unexpected places.

In Act I there is a beautiful number for the people of Peking, ‘Perché tarde la luna’. The sound sweeps the audience away into an exotic world suffused with a romantic musical glow. First the women and then the men sing a repeated note as the violins climb slowly higher and higher in long, sustained notes. Gradually short phrases emerge that float around, rising and falling, and then sustained. The volume pulses in waves, from soft to loud, then dying again, and between each little set of phrases there is a pause, as though the men and women are waiting for something to happen. The orchestra decorates this sumptuous vocal quality with a range of rising and falling phrases of their own: sliding strings, wafting woodwind, little punctuating points of percussion. The combination is strange, hypnotic and downright magical.

But there's something darker lurking beneath. Eventually the musical elements coalesce into a single, loud repeated statement chanted by all the voices at the climax of the chorus. What the people of Peking are chanting at the end is ‘Pu-Tin-Pao’, the name of the executioner. (He is described in the stage directions as ‘enormous, gigantic, tragic… carrying his immense sword on his shoulder’). The crowd sing their suspenseful chorus as they keenly wait for the rising of the moon. When the moon rises it is time for the executioner to do his work, for another head to roll. The beautiful vision of the natural world in their words is related to a severed head, a lover of the dead. We can find the same verbal and musical imagery in Richard Strauss’s Salome – with another executioner and another severed head. Opera can be a bloody business!

This Turandot crowd are in thrall to an erotically charged bloodlust. What throws the chorus into even starker relief is what immediately follows. We hear the angelic voices of boy trebles singing a little processional tune that represents the beautiful and vengeful Princess Turandot – a genuine Chinese melody to suit the ancient Chinese setting of the opera. Temple gongs are heard lightly striking under their voices, and there is the steady intoning quality of a formal procession. It is mesmerizing and seductive and fades to nothing. They are accompanying the young Prince of Persia who has failed to answer correctly the three riddles posed by the Princess. The penalty for failure is death – so he is about to be beheaded by Pu-Tin-Pao. Gorgeous music, violent passions. It’s exactly the sort of shiver-down-the spine moment that opera does so well.

]]>http://www.roh.org.uk/news/musical-highlight-a-shiver-down-the-spine-moment-from-puccinis-turandot/feed4Choral music in the spotlight at the Royal Opera Househttp://www.roh.org.uk/news/choral-music-in-the-spotlight-at-the-royal-opera-house
http://www.roh.org.uk/news/choral-music-in-the-spotlight-at-the-royal-opera-house#commentsTue, 20 Aug 2013 14:36:04 +0000Lottie Butlerhttp://www.roh.org.uk/?p=23150

Earlier this summer a three-day celebration of choral music in all its forms took place in Thurrock. The second FUSED Thurrock Music Festival raised the roof in the unusual (and impressive) setting of the Tilbury Cruise Terminal and featured two full days of workshops as well as performances.

April Smith, a member of the Royal Opera House Thurrock Community Chorus attended a workshop about conducting: 'I came away with a much greater respect and understanding of how difficult a task conducting is, as well as material to work on myself.’

Other workshops included vocal techniques for male and female voices; introductions to opera and gospel singing; vocal leadership; and an inspirational beat-boxing demonstration from MC Zani.

Although the festival has passed for this year there are many ways to get involved in choral singing in Thurrock. The Royal Opera House Thurrock Community Chorus, who were one of the groups taking part in FUSED, meet weekly at High House Production Park and are open to new members. They will perform at the Deloitte Ignite Festival of Voices at the Royal Opera House on 22 September, as will the RM19 Youth Singing Group, also based in Thurrock, and led by Dominic Peckham. Throughout the day there will be free workshops and opportunities to sing, both for beginners and experienced singers. Booking is now open for free tickets.